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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

E-Sata / USB 3 Card for Mac Pro

attention with the atto H680 if you want to use it with a SAS-4xesata fan-out cable. with the recent mac os and drivers, you can only use 1 esata device per SAS connection... not so good...
 
Filip, I find that hard to believe. I don't own the card myself to test, but that would be a huge problem for many people. Maybe your fan-out cable is bad or you have some other problem.
Jeff, or someone else, can you confirm what Filip said?
 
Not true, or at least I can't duplicate that issue here. I'm running 10.8.2 with the H680 and can run multiple devices just fine. Filip actually posted this same statement to another thread and both Tim Jones and I responded saying that ours are working just fine. I'm betting Filip has a bad fan-out cable or perhaps a bad connector on his card. It could actually be lots of things causing it. But in a situation where all aspects of the card and cables check out, all ports are useable. at the same time. I'm routinely offloading REDMAGs onto one or two eSATA drives via the H680 card. And the one I'm using most lately is in a Sonnet Thunderbolt expander too. Mostly connected to an iMac. In fact, I just backed up that iMac with Pegasus R6 RAID to LTO-4 tape. The LTO-4 drive is connected to the H680 in the Sonnet Thunderbolt expander and I had both a G-Tech and CalDigit eSATA units attached to the fan-out cable on the other SAS port. All lumped into the same backup. Also works copying from eSATA RED Station modules to eSATA hard drives connected to the card in the Thunderbolt expander, both on this iMac and connected to my retina MBP. ...I have an H680 card in my 2010 Mac Pro, but it's still running OSX 10.7.5 for various reasons.
 
i tested the atto issue with the fan-out cable with a recent = new H680, 2 cards, multiple mac's and sonnet echoexpress chassis, tested 2 different fan-out cables from highpoint, also different adapters to this one, or similar, http://www.addonics.com/products/ad4saml.php , with different sas cables, but no go. When contacting Atto, support told me it is normal, as not supported anymore :
quote :" I apologize for the delay in my response. I have consulted with one of our CE's on this and apparently our H680 HBA can only be used for a single eSATA drive but not for multiple drives or with the use of port multipliers. Yes in the past you have been able to use The R380 and H380 this way, but it is no longer supported with our H680. "
so Jeff, if it works for you, it would be usefull to know the driver versions and firmware of your card, brand of fan-out cable...

I REALLY want Atto to fix this, if they technically can, as i like a lot the Atto products, but without this feature, the H680 is only usefull for LTO drives...
So i'm now looking for alternatives, but the Highpoint SAS card driver doenst seem to work in the Sonnet Echoexpress Thunderbolt expansion chassis...
Perhaps we need to move much faster to native thunderbolt and usb3 adapters/drives... and forget about esata ?
I really like the Lacie 2Big drives, only you need to buy the trays from lacie, but pricing is decent.
For use of those trays on the Macpro, you buy the usb3-only version, and set it to JBOD, The usb3 version is less efficient than the thunderbolt for Arri-raw files = lots of small files, but for RED files its working perfectly. The nice thing is that you have a compact housing where you have 2 independent drives for offloading and not to much cabling and at the end of the day, you can split the copies for producer and postproduction.
 
I wish I'd spotted this thread an hour ago. I just posted on Tim Jones' thread so apologies for duplicating and I will try to summarise:

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showth...ectivity-Notes&p=1097512&posted=1#post1097512

I am having a similar issue to Filip.

I can copy from RED Mag SSD reader(s), to 2x eSATA drives - on the same fanout attached to the H680.

I can only copy to one eSATA hard drive, when copying from a Promise R6 or SAS Storage via a 10GigE network adapter (currently in a Sonnet Echo Express SE).

Have tried H680 in a Magma 3T and Sonnet Echo Express Pro chassis. Multiple miniSAS to fanouts and latest Atto Drivers. Retina MBP, OSX 10.7.5.

Thanks.
 
Charlie, sounds like the issue is with the 10Ge adapter or an IP transport issue somewhere along the line. Doubt it's with the ATTO card. But you also mention the Promise R6 and SAS storage, so I'm somewhat confused as to what you mean there. I can copy to and from multiple eSATA devices on the H680 cards here from other SAS storage or from a Promise R6 on Thunderbolt over to multiple eSATA devices on the H680. Give us more details about your setups and specific problems.
 
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